Planetary Intelligence

The researchers believe that such thought experiments can help humans to understand their impact on the Earth and serve as a guide on how to better it. Interestingly, they also believe that it could aid in the search for aliens too.  "We're saying the only technological civilizations we may ever see — the ones we should expect to see — are the ones that didn't kill themselves, meaning they must have reached the stage of a true planetary intelligence," Frank said.  "That's the power of this line of inquiry," he added. "It unites what we need to know to survive the climate crisis with what might happen on any planet where life and intelligence evolve."

Schmidt points to an irony, however: if a civilization is able to find a more sustainable way to produce energy without harming its host planet, it will leave behind less evidence that it was there.

You want to have a nice, large-scale civilization that does wonderful things but that doesn’t push the planet into domains that are dangerous for itself, the civilization,” Frank says. “We need to figure out a way of producing and using energy that doesn’t put us at risk.”

Can we create a version of civilization that doesn’t push the earth into a domain that’s dangerous for us as a species? “The point is not to ‘save the earth,’” says Frank. “No matter what we do to the planet, we’re just creating niches for the next cycle of evolution. But, if we continue on this trajectory of using fossil fuels and ignoring the climate change it drives, we human beings may not be part of Earth’s ongoing evolution.”

Today, the increasing availability of digital traces provides researchers like Ghoshal and the members of his lab an incredible amount of data for complex systems research. Using GPS location tracking, check-ins on apps like Foursquare, geocaching from Twitter posts, and, under some circumstances, call data records from cell phones, they are able to find patterns in human mobility, traffic, and disease progressions with greater accuracy and precision than ever before. But the amount of data available also means that the burgeoning field of complex systems can be overwhelmed without some constraints.

“You’re going from orders of tens and hundreds of data points to orders of millions and billions,” Ghoshal says. “When you have this change of scale, the simple ways of drawing diagrams don’t work; you need laws to dictate how the data interact.” That’s where physics enters the picture.

Ghoshal and members of his lab used science to untangle complex systems and networks. Their work extends to three main branches: human dynamics and behaviors; urban systems and city science; and social networks. Applying the universal rules of physics and mathematics, they are able to build foundational models onto which other researchers—such as economists or city planners—can introduce more complex variables.

There are differences between the way a physicist looks at a problem compared to a computer scientist,” says Hugo Barbosa, a post-doctoral researcher in Ghoshal’s lab, whose PhD is in computer science. “Physicists are more interested in the fundamental rules, the things that are universal, regardless of the populations. They want to understand the basic components of those models and make those components as general and universal as possible.”

One project, conducted by Surendra Hazarie, a PhD student in physics, uses the data to look at segregation patterns in cities, along lines of income, race, or other characteristics. “By looking at the ways populations flow around cities in the different regions, we can examine the way those populations are split up in important ways,” he says. “Maybe wealthier communities tend to box themselves in and things like that.”

It’s more about how can we leverage this knowledge to, for example, improve the synchronization of traffic lights and diverge the flow of people to a different area of the city if there is an accident? How can we foster and promote reducing segregation? How can we help prevent the spread of diseases in existing airports or hospitals?”

Understanding how people and locations are connected and analyzing those relationships through network centrality helps inform my predictive models in ways that would not have been possible using traditional statistical methods,” Marshall says. “Network science changes the way we view patient movements in the hospital and helps us develop tools to improve patient outcomes and reduce the spread of infection.”

Right now, our civilization is what the researchers call an “immature technosphere,” a conglomeration of human-generated systems and technology that directly affects the planet but is not self-maintaining. For instance, the majority of our energy usage involves consuming fossil fuels that degrade Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. The technology and energy we consume to survive are destroying our home planet, which will, in turn, destroy our species.

To survive as a species, then, we need to collectively work in the best interest of the planet. But, Frank says, “we don’t yet have the ability to communally respond in the best interests of the planet. There is intelligence on Earth, but there isn’t planetary intelligence.”

We are saying that in a sense the planet itself obtains cognitive skills.  Just as the Gaia hypothesis (which proposes that the biosphere interacts strongly with the non-living geological systems of air, water, and land to maintain Earth's habitable state) proposed that in a sense a planet is alive – in the sense that the living organisms so thoroughly permeate and transform the physical planet that life has become a quality of the planet and not merely something incidentally added on to a nonliving planet – we are saying that the same can be said about cognition. Cognitive processes have become planetary scale processes which are deeply implicated into the functioning of the planet,” Grinspoon said.

This understanding will help humans better take care of Earth by seeing ourselves as being in the midst of a planetary transformation in which technological  intelligence is starting to become integrated into planetary functioning, but has not yet done so successfully, Grinspoon said. We may be able to formulate new visions of how this transformation can play out and result in a sustainable planetary civilization, and what the physical requirements for such a well-functioning techno sphere would be, and perhaps even gain some insight into what the organizational requirements would be in terms of global coordination of planet-altering technologies

In this paper, however, we wish to broaden the view of intelligence by taking a planetary view of its appearance and effect. Here, we consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition. In this way, it might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and evolution is planetary, as opposed to the traditional focus on individual species

planetary intelligence

We believe the concept of planetary intelligence holds promise in providing a framework for understanding possible paths of long-term inhabited planetary evolution that is both broad and deep. Most important, it may ultimately help unite disparate perspectives into a single explanatory paradigm for the transitions in the Earth-system observed in the past, with what we are experiencing now and will experience in the future evolution of the Earth.